"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis

Sunday, July 03, 2016

Elie Wiesel (1928-2016)

>

"The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference"
(For a perspective on Wiesel's "last years," see below)

The 1986 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, "who used his moral authority to force attention on atrocities around the world" (as Emily Langer puts it in her WaPo obit), in 2004

Eye-Witness and Messenger

The Jewish author, philosopher and humanist Elie Wiesel has made it his life's work to bear witness to the genocide committed by the Nazis during World War II. Today he is the world's leading spokesman on the Holocaust.

After Hitler's forces had moved into Hungary in 1944, the Wiesel family was deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland. Elie Wiesel's mother and younger sister perished in the gas chamber there. In 1945 Elie and his father were sent on to Buchenwald, where his father died of starvation and dysentery. Seventeen-year-old Elie was still alive when American soldiers opened the camp.

For the world to remember and learn from the Holocaust is not Elie Wiesel's only goal. It is equally important to fight indifference and the attitude that "it's no concern of mine". Elie Wiesel sees the struggle against indifference as a struggle for peace. In his words, "The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference".

Considering how long a time frame there has been for preparing, you'd think a person would be prepared to say something on learning of the death of Elie Wiesel, which was confirmed yesterday by his son, who asked that in consideration of shabat the family be allowed to mourn privately the rest of the day. Yet I find myself all but speechless, given the extent to which he, a survivor himself, came to personify the victims of the Holocaust (which number included his mother, his father, and his younger sister; two older sisters also survived), tracking world events from the perspective of his unquietable awareness of the atrocities humans are capable of.

1 Comments:

This post is perfectly illustrative of his life, highlighting his own tragic suffering and his tragic shameless complicity with Palestinians' suffering.

In my opinion, and I'm born of Jewish parents, Wiesel completely abandoned any claim to moral values by directly and knowingly lending his immense stature to the cause of irrational hate and sadistic violence. That stature has been reduced to dust.